PRIORITIZATION IN MEDICAL HUMANITARIAN AID: A BRIEF LOOK INTO THE FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES

Abstract

United Nations and partner organizations assisted almost 200 million people in 2022 across 63 countries through joint funding amounting to 41 billion dollars (United Nations Global Humanitarian Overview, 2022). Some organizations taking on the biggest burden of providing this aid, specifically medical humanitarian aid, are the International Committee of the Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières. In 2023, these organizations addressed almost 200 missions worldwide, staffing nearly 100,000 across both organizations (ICRC, Annual Report 2023) (MSF, Annual Report, 2023). As the number of people requiring aid globally continues to increase while funding and capacity dwindle, a resource allocation crisis is created, forcing these organizations to prioritize (Slim, 2024). Priortization, a more contemporary term in humanitarian aid is understood as who humanitarian aid organizations can help and when. The ICRC and MSF maintain clear ethical codes, such as the ICRC’s list of Fundamental Principles, however, the justifications that humanitarian aid organizations articulate for prioritization are vaguely externalized. Therefore, The research question guiding this paper was, “How do humanitarian aid organizations (e.g., IRC and MSF) articulate justifications for prioritization?” The initial literature review revealed that humanitarian aid organizations partly derive decision-making processes from certain internal ethical codes and principles, whether implicitly or explicitly. This prompted a realist evaluation of three emergency humanitarian interventions as case studies, a conflict, climate, and epidemic disaster through publicly available data. The cross-analysis of those three case studies, the Syrian Civil War (2011-ongoing), Cyclone Idai (2019), and finally the Ebola Virus Outbreak in West Africa (2014-2016) indicated the absence of some principles and the presence of other external factors that influence prioritization.